A Reconfigurable Interface for Ergonomic and Dynamic Tele-Locomanipulation

Prolonged remote tele-locomanipulation of multi degrees-of-freedom mobile manipulators requires a compromise between the system’s performance and the operator’s ergonomics. Neglecting this demand can significantly affect either the task completion or the level of comfort to achieve it. However, the simultaneous consideration of these key factors has received less attention in the literature. To respond to this demand, in this work, we introduce a new teleoperation setup, which integrates the features of an ergonomic and a highly maneuverable interface into a unified solution. The ergonomic part of the interface implements a 3D mouse-like functionality, enabling the execution of long navigation tasks for the floating base. The highly manoeuvrable interface instead, enables the operator to perform dynamic or more precise manipulation by moving his/her arm in space. The locomotion and manipulation modes of the follower robot are controlled separately, which can be easily and seamlessly switched by the operator by pressing a button at any moment. Furthermore, due to the follower manipulator’s redundancy, this robot is controlled by a hierarchical quadratic programming technique which enables the definition of a set of secondary tasks to be executed in the robot’s nullspace. Finally, to demonstrate the advantages and disadvantages of the proposed user interfaces, five participants are asked to perform two different experiments: (i) target selection task on a moving surface and (ii) remote path tracking on a fixed surface. The quantitative and qualitative analyses show the effectiveness of the proposed interface during the teleoperation tasks, especially when it comes to the precise and dynamic task execution.